Silent Planet
by miss-emotive
Summary: No matter how much we've lost, we are always blessed. That's what you used to say. Back in the world where everything was normal, I used to believe you. [TomHuck, TomQuartermain]


**Silent Planet  
**By Jun-Ko 

_"I felt you cut free, turning cold shoulders to me  
Growing blame lines, communicating lies  
Nothing more to trust, fallacies of love.  
Bring me back to this, what you said, useless  
Leave me, I'll shed my skin, these scars will mend  
Don't worry about me  
The heart is supposed to bleed..."_

"Fault Line" by 10 Years

* * *

**I)**  
Cherry pies and stolen delights. Ladders and windowsills. Paintbrushes and river rafts. Toys of childhood like treasures for our later-life. The full moon from beneath the leafy oak and first kisses like a necklace of seed pearls as white as your teeth. Thinking of you, swimming carelessly in the fire pond a few states over from where we grew up. Little bubbles of air clinging on to your skin, your nipples grazing the water, tremulous dark beads, and I thought, you are gloriously shamelessly amazingly naked.

Buzzing heat and hotter touches. Hushed moans of pleasure and the pains of loss. I am thinking of certain summers that will not leave, so I will relive them, again and again, until I can live no more.

Why is it that the thing that can mean the most -- three words -- is always a quotation? Never original. Never the first. "I love you" is a quote. So is that all there is to love? Imitation of past things. Life, in a box, complete with house and children. Is the purpose of coupling not to reproduce? A scale-sized reproduction that grows over time.

I don't want to reproduce. I want to create something entirely new.

Love demands expression. It will not sit down and be good. It will not shut up and be polite, nor will it hide in the corner and wait its turn -- it will spring out when it so pleases and ambush the most unwitting person, and when it has done its job it will demand thanks and that you say its name a million times a day to whomever you have fallen for.

The day was so hot that the heat was buzzing in my skull, shirt drenched in sweat and transparent. You traced the outline of my stomach muscles with deft fingers, sending love and sex shooting through my body, to every nerve and artery and vein. When we said the words for the first time it was still a marvel; we were savages who discovered three words and worshipped them in the temple of our bodies and of our entwined limbs and sweating skin, fingers, toes -- I could feel the joints of your knees beneath the flesh of my palms when I held on to them, spreading your legs, taking away all that was separating us and keeping us together and molding us like clay into one beating organism, the heat making it so we have been burned together. So that the only way we would be separated is to shatter the both of us. Break us into pieces so small that there will be too many missing to make us whole again.

As you shuddered into rapture you looked up, looking at me through glazed eyes, half-crazed in sensation and touched my face. "No matter how much we've lost, we are always blessed." That's what you used to say. Back in the world where everything was normal, I used to believe you.

**II)  
**A few months earlier, the river at the end of town flooded after a week of heavy rain. Everywhere, there was water. Creek water. Pond water. Sewage in the water from the river, and our house was flooded to mid-calf. Looking at our yard was like standing over a new world; everything submerged except for little bumps in the road, looking like little islands in the sea. It was fun at first and we played like the boys we had grown up out of, but after a week I began to miss the feel of walking with dry feet.

We didn't have a farm, but we knew of those farms outside of town which had lost so much; washed-away equipment and lost or dead livestock. Everyone in our little community was kept busy for the whole time helping those who had lost things in the flood. It was only after the flood waters had finally gone down did I realized that we had lost too -- almost everyday I remembered some small item that I had and never realized until I discovered that it had been swept away. Maybe it should have made me feel bad, taking so many things for granted, but it didn't. I felt like it was a new beginning, like the start of some universe inside of me, blooming like some cosmic kind of flower inside my throat, where everything in the beginning was quiet. I used to sit on the threshold of our doorway admiring the moon's reflection on the waters when you'd come by and sit with me, talking and dreaming by my side.

"No matter how much we've lost, we are always blessed."

That was before the day at the fire pond. Before I ever touched you in any way that was romantic or loving or sexual. At the time I didn't need to, because I had you and you were my best friend and as long as you were here I didn't need anything else. As long as you would not be suddenly washed away by the tide of life then I was happy.

When you died, I didn't cry. There were too many pieces missing. There was too much water in the world already.

**III)**  
The dust was so dry, worn skeletons of the dead, buried in the dream time before white man inhabited this strange land. I looked down at the cross where Quartermain lay and felt my dry throat closing up. I almost choke.

Why is it that some are just born to loss? I contemplate this as I cock the rifle. Was I fashioned to suffer? Ripped out of a womb in a river of blood to forever drown in those of my friends' own? Love is a hunter -- a great white hunter -- and I am the game. A curse, upon this game. How can I play when the rules keep changing and my teammates are taken away from me so abruptly? Love is blind, love makes the world go round, love is all you need. It's the clichés that cause the trouble but suddenly originality seemed to have too high a price. I want to shove this emotion underneath the earth where my second lover's body now lay and sit on a mound of earth contemplating in silence the clichés that are overplayed and predictable, and -- therefore -- secure.

Or rather, I will be the wingless bug moldering in the dirt not having to worry about love. I will be a worm and eat the dirt, eat what Alan's body will become in a few years' time, move the earth in my little way and not have to worry about finding someone to patch up the two empty holes where Alan and Huck used to be because I will be asexual and can live without having to bind myself to someone in that complicated way that humans tend to do. I will change sex and find another to exchange sperm with and then I will be off to make more copies of me who will be blessed enough not to have to lose anything of too much importance.

I find myself on my knees when a warm hand settles on my shoulder and I see Dr Jekyll standing above me and suddenly I want him to hit me -- I want him to hit me so hard that it will release the tears so I will flood even the driest place in Africa and bring back all of those who have left me.

_No matter how much we've lost, we are always blessed._

Blessed with emotions. Blessed with sadness. Blessed with memories.

Yes, I am blessed, with all of those things.

Jekyll helps me to my feet, and still I do not cry. Aboard the Nautilus, at night, on the surface, I look out at the ocean and feel like it has all come out of me. Even now I am drowning in my shallow regret.


End file.
